Ten years on from the fox hunting ban, has anything really changed?

Despite the law, hunters, saboteurs and camera-armed vigilantes still play cat
and mouse across the countryside - and foxes are still being killed

This article was first published on February 18, 2015, on the 10th anniversary of the hunting ban

In 2004 Tony Blair made a bet with Prince of Wales. The Prince thought Labour’s proposed ban on foxhunting was absurd, and said as much, so Blair wagered that people would still be hunting after he had left office. “But how, if you’re going to ban it?” asked the Prince. “I don’t know,” said Blair, “but I’ll find a way.”

The Labour prime minister, by his own admission, was never ideologically opposed to hunting. But the ban was necessary to satisfy a key block of his MPs who had pushed tuition fees through Parliament. This quid pro quo swiftly became politically costly, however, and Blair became convinced he had made a mistake when a woman he met in Italy, who was mistress of a hunt near Oxford, explained how deeply intertwined the tradition was with Britain’s rural economy. “From that moment on,” he writes in his memoir, A Journey, “I became determined to slip out of this.” In the end, the law was “a masterly British compromise” which left hunting “banned and not quite banned at the same time”.

What is certain is that, far from dying out, the process of hunting has prospered, with some 45,000 people regularly taking part and 250,000 turning out across the country for the most recent Boxing Day meets. Officially these are “drag hunts”, where hounds follow a chemical trail laid across the countryside, or “trail hunts”, where the hunt’s path loops and overlaps to simulate unpredictable vulpine meanderings. Yet it would be wrong to say that hunting is now a bloodless sport, because – whisper it – some foxes are still pursued to their deaths.

There’s no way to know for certain how often this happens. If you ask Lee Moon, the answer is “all the time”. Moon is the spokesman for the Hunt Saboteurs’ Association (HSA), an umbrella body for 40 or 50 local groups who spend their winters chasing, tracking and disrupting hunts. Saboteurs, or “sabs”, spray oils on the ground to mislead the dogs, crack whips to deter them, and blow hunting horns to confuse them.

Moon, who has been sabbing since the late 1990s, and whose groups have attended thousands of hunts since then, believes many prominent hunts routinely break the law. “They do exactly now what they used to do before the Hunting Act,” he says. “Some of it changes slightly when we or the police are there, but we believe that when there’s no one watching them – and often when we are there – they continue to hunt illegally.”

Paul Tillsley, head of investigations at the League Against Cruel Sports, agrees. His staff spend much of their time covertly recording hunts, though he cannot say how many have been referred to the police because it would compromise their work. Still, he says: “Hunts are breaking the law quite regularly. As far as we can tell, when hunts think they are not being watched, they get on as they always have done.”

Naturally, hunters take a different view – not least because they are proud of hunting as a great British tradition. Yet they do admit that foxes are killed. Sometimes their conduct is clearly illegal: one crown court judge described his appellants as employing “cynical subterfuge”, saying they had “used a trail hunt as a cover.”

At other times, things are murkier. “This is delicate ground,” says one hunter, “but a lot of foxes get killed by hunts still. Hounds are basically killing machines, so the huntsman doesn’t have to say 'go and kill that fox’. They find the fox by scent, and they kill it, and they’re not breaking the law because they haven’t been told to. Or at least you can’t prove they’ve been told to – we haven’t yet become so medieval that we can try animals.”

Even if hunters don’t break the Act, they test it. “We push the law to the limits,” says Tim Bonner, director of campaigns at the Countryside Alliance. “We use whatever opportunities we can to keep the tradition alive without breaking the law.”

One exemption lets hunters use a full pack of dogs to “flush” the fox towards a bird of prey – so hunts across the country now carry eagles or owls along with them as a kind of majestically flapping disclaimer. One even considered naming their bird Notil – for Notil Eagle. “Of course it may be that the hounds catch foxes whilst they’re attempting to flush them,” notes Bonner. (Hunters insist the birds do actually kill the foxes. Falconers say this is possible, but dangerous, and advise against it.)

It's hard to prove intent when these exemptions are abused. Government figures show the Hunting Act outperforms, in terms of convictions, similar environmental legislation, with 527 people charged between 2005 and 2013. Of those, 341 were convicted – both a higher number and a higher rate than under Acts protecting badgers and deer.

But, according to the Countryside Alliance, only 6 per cent of these convictions involved registered hunts as opposed to casual poachers. Of the 52 people who were involved with hunts, 21 were convicted, and the rest were acquitted or their cases dropped. For Bonner this is evidence that there is no “persistent and blatant” lawbreaking; if there was, he says, the cameras would catch them.

A case from 2013 involving the Heythrop – David Cameron’s local hunt – illustrates how costly these cases can be. The RSPCA received more than 500 hours of footage from activists, and decided to launch a prosecution. But it had to spend £320,000 – an amountthe judge called “staggering" – to secure a £6,000 fine divided between four people. An independent report ordered by its trustees recommended leaving future actions to the police - despite its finding that illegal hunting had become "business as usual".

For one thing hunters and sabs agree upon is that the police aren’t that interested. “They hate trying to enforce this law because they do not want to spend an entire Saturday running around the countryside chasing after some huntsmen,” says one supporter. Moon too complaints that officers “don’t know what they’re looking at” and often take hunters at their word. That’s unsurprising when the difference between legal and illegal conduct can hinge on the precise manner in which a hunting horn is blown or the exact piece of hunting jargon bellowed out from horseback.

This is the crucial thing to understand about Wednesday's vote. When MPs file into the lobbies, they will technically be deciding on whether to widen the circumstances in which a full pack is permitted. In practice, however, they will be deciding whether to widen the fig leaf under which illegal hunts operate. It will now be possible for hunters with a full pack to claim it is merely there for flushing – and harder than ever for hidden videographers to prove otherwise. For hunt proponents, this is a good thing, because it means less police time wasted and fewer liberties trampled in pursuit of an unjust and unenforcible law. But it illustrates the bizarre effects of Tony Blair's ten-year fudge.

Meanwhile, the clandestine war in the countryside goes on. Sabs track hunts across the fields, trying to stop them or catch them breaking the Act, while huntsmen keep their hounds trained and their traditions alive in the firm conviction that the ban will soon pass. “Things have gone on more as before than people thought,” says one supporter. The effect, he claims, is more psychological. Huntsmen, who look after the hounds with each group, are the ones who actually face prosecution. “They tend to be more uneducated, less well-off individuals, and so it’s a constant fear for them.”

Supporters call the Act “a farce”; the League wants it strengthened, with provisions for reckless hunting and stiffer sentences. Despite their differences, they both have a point. For the legislation as it stands fudges the question, satisfying neither animal rights nor personal liberties. Hunting continues, but not quite as it used to. Tony Blair has won his bet. But he is the only clear winner.

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